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Mourning Google

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Re: Mourning Google

#401

Post by opportune »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #310
Chathamization wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the impression I have. I remember a little over a decade ago when the population at large was completely hyped about all of the world changing technology we were going to see coming from the moonshots at Google X. The excitement over Google Glass, the mystery over the Google barges. Eventually, people started wondering when these hyped up products in development were going to actually become products[1]. Not i…

You have observational bias based on the things that you are interested in and observed as an outside observer. The real innovation at Google is internal and invisible to you -- often secret, maybe kind of boring, but totally transformational. It's infrastructure and its support. And all those moonshot things and stuff were mainly PR, sideshows, and not the primary focus of the company's brains. And they ke thing is…

I’m biased, as I am guessing you are too, but there is at least some innovation in infrastructure at Google outside of search and ads. Spanner, Borg/Kubernetes/GKE, PAAS, BigQuery and the successive internal query systems just to name a few. Sure many of these were funded by ads or motivated by their problems/use case originally - you’d expect that of a company that started with search and exclusively made money from ads for a long stretch - but they’ve all been developed to solve for many for workloads now, and even made available for external consumption as infrastructure products. For some they have made huge impacts on the entire software industry.

That said, yes there are a lot of SWEs and projects that are wasting engineering talent.

I’m guessing you were closer to the hardware than me, and also left at least several years ago, but I’m under the impression that the rest of industry has mostly caught up to where Google was in DC tech. They’re still at the tip of the spear with things like ML and unmatched in sheer scale, it’s just that the rest of the world has had a lot of time to play catch up.

Re: Mourning Google

#402

Post by nonameiguess »

Apocryphon wrote: post #292
nonameiguess wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the real core of the problem. Bell Labs was populated by hackers who were perfectly content to earn double to triple what an average factory worker was getting for less toil while doing cool shit. FAANGs became too profitable and attracted people who would have been finance bros in the 90s. Engineers expected to be compensated like quants and directors like portfolio managers. You don't get a Skunk Works or D…

You make a lot of good points, but was the failure of Google moonshots really the fault of the workers who were easily lured by comp, or management who were impatient about seeing material results? Seems like either could have been chasing higher returns. Initiatives like Google Fiber flaming out were certainly not the fault of anyone at the company. Maybe for drastically underestimating the difficulty of the problem…

I try to look at systems level more than blaming certain individuals. I'm sure a lot of engineers working on Google X projects honest to God cared deeply about the specific problem they were tackling. My own wife was once pretty close to taking a job there. But unless they're going to donate labor by working for free, they can't fund the projects themselves. The company has to be willing to lose money on most if not all of their work. I guess that worked for a while when ads were so profitable and no one else did them well enough. I may be misremembering my history, but as far as I understood, Bell Labs had to do this kind of public good work as a condition of being granted a national monopoly.

At the cultural level, though, during periods like the space race and cold war, there seemed to be a national zeitgeist such that companies, their owners, their directors, were all willing to sacrifice some profit to serve a common national mission. Maybe it was just the fact that the CEOs had grown up in a time when food was rationed and factories were ordered by federal fiat to produce war materiel.

I don't actually think this type of culture is completely dead, for what it's worth. But it's not exactly in vogue. I personally work in defense, I served in the Army, and I make more than enough money but quite a bit less than Netflix likely would have paid me, but I work on products that serve US strategic interests. Entire companies exist explicitly for this purpose, but they're not Google scale and never will be. I don't think very many people on Hacker News would even consider this good, though. Witness the backlash to OpenAI even being willing to work on military applications at all. The readership is so cynical that they can't imagine a military serving any purpose aside from valueless destruction. In the 20th century when militaries saved the world from German and Japanese conquest and mass genocide, that kind of thinking was a lot less prevalent.

I also don't think these are the only two options, either. People can also be motivated purely by the science itself or by the global wellbeing of all mankind. I just don't know that, historically speaking, those bring large-scale resource mobilization to bear quite as well as getting rich and ensuring the continued strategic dominance of a way of life represented by a country of birth you deeply believe in. As people come to believe less and less in their own countries, we seem to be left mostly with getting rich as the only viable option.

Re: Mourning Google

#403

Post by neuromanser »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #310
Chathamization wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the impression I have. I remember a little over a decade ago when the population at large was completely hyped about all of the world changing technology we were going to see coming from the moonshots at Google X. The excitement over Google Glass, the mystery over the Google barges. Eventually, people started wondering when these hyped up products in development were going to actually become products[1]. Not i…

You have observational bias based on the things that you are interested in and observed as an outside observer. The real innovation at Google is internal and invisible to you -- often secret, maybe kind of boring, but totally transformational. It's infrastructure and its support. And all those moonshot things and stuff were mainly PR, sideshows, and not the primary focus of the company's brains. And they ke thing is…

> The real innovation in Google is the stuff that people on this forum don't see. Because it's mostly secret or invisible.

All the ore reason to mourn as the Bell labs output benefited humanity while the Google innovations are poised to disappear when the company fails.

Re: Mourning Google

#404

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #394
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2012?? Google was founded in 1998. 2012 is 14 years later. I'm fine with the argument that they had already abandoned "Don't be Evil" by that point in time.

In 2012, "Don't be evil" was still their corporate motto. I'll assume you just skipped over the part in the reference where their graduate research done in the 1990s that went into Google was funded by the CIA and NSA. They knew what they were doing and who they were doing it with all along. Suggesting otherwise defies rationality.

I worked at the University of Washington, dept of Computer Science & Engineering, for the first half of the 1990s. I was there when the first webcrawler was created (Brian Pinkerton). I knew a lot of graduate students there. I was the "webmaster" too.

I feel fairly confident in saying that even though the facts of the MDDS grant that was helping to fund Page & Brin's graduate student research are clear, I do not believe that the involvement of the US military and intelligence services would have been particularly obvious and/or significant in their minds.

Saying "They knew what they were doing and who they were doing it with all along" defies everything I knew about university CS graduate student research. I knew several UW graduate students (including one of my best friends) who were recipients of grant money that originated with the military/intelligence services; they were highly buffered from donor contacts and even donor requirements while working on their research. Most of them would joke to the effect of "our grant donor(s) would have a fit if they knew what we are actually working on", and would often have to struggle to explain how their research fit into the ostensible goals of the donor. I've also known many graduate students over the years for whom, especially in the early phases of their PhD research, it wasn't even clear to them precisely what they were doing, let alone "for whom".

Re: Mourning Google

#405

Post by samirillian »

throwawayqqq11 wrote: post #120
samirillian wrote: post #25

I like Tbray's posts but I want to quibble over language. What's happening to the term "late stage capitalism"? Feels like it's becoming a meme like neoliberalism. What does it even mean to say that it wasn't tech's fault, it was late stage capitalism's fault? Kind of dodging a particular responsibility with a generality. I think LSC came to prominence through cultural marxists like David Harvey and Frederic Jameson.…

Id argue that neoliberalism is not just a meme and what the author, i think, refers to with LSC is an underlying systemic property of capitalism, that tries to do its capitalism thing in a saturated world. Capitalism is great in growing, greed is not per se bad but these capitalist incentives start to cannibalize everything once growth hits deminishing returns. The "good capitalist times" end exactly here. Thats what…

I realize cultural marxist was confusing word choice but I meant it in a purely descriptive sense.

I'm critiquing Tbray who is obviously not a radical leftist from the left. And I'm questioning the implicit claim made by some Marxists that capitalism is now on its last legs, not from left or right but as a question of fact.

Re: Mourning Google

#406

Post by Apocryphon »

nonameiguess wrote: post #402
Apocryphon wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make a lot of good points, but was the failure of Google moonshots really the fault of the workers who were easily lured by comp, or management who were impatient about seeing material results? Seems like either could have been chasing higher returns. Initiatives like Google Fiber flaming out were certainly not the fault of anyone at the company. Maybe for drastically underestimating the difficulty of the problem…

I try to look at systems level more than blaming certain individuals. I'm sure a lot of engineers working on Google X projects honest to God cared deeply about the specific problem they were tackling. My own wife was once pretty close to taking a job there. But unless they're going to donate labor by working for free, they can't fund the projects themselves. The company has to be willing to lose money on most if not…

If I had to guess, it's because from the Iraq War to modern day border theater, popular image of the military ain't what it used to be. It also seems like tech intended for defense is adjacent to civilian intelligence and law enforcement use, of which there is also cynicism and fears of surveillance- see Palantir viewed as the commercial equivalent to PRISM, for instance.

The public has had substantial loss of faith in its institutions in the past couple of decades, and the military is not exempt from it. America's foreign policy has come a long way since WWII.

Politics aside, I've also seen cynicism towards Silicon Valley tech from the defense world- USAF vet and commentator Mike Black's vitriolic criticism of Anduril and other defense startups, for instance (e.g. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1575677683211505665.html https://twitter.com/mikeblack114/status/1730453326817276026 https://twitter.com/MikeBlack114/status/1736481633358770353 https://twitter.com/MikeBlack114/status/1741366626006560864). Though that is tangential to your point.

But I don't think all is lost. I'm pretty sure solidly civilian organizations like United States Digital Service and 18F have good reputations, much like the Postal Service does. But all of them receive a pittance of investment compared to defense spending.

Re: Mourning Google

#407

Post by opportune »

rezonant wrote: post #24
cousin_it wrote: post #16

I have a different theory about the cause of the decline. Google 10-15 years ago had a clear idea of how to win: hire the best programmers, give them freedom, and they'll build products that will win in every market. And, well, that hasn't happened. Long before the current talk of Google's decline, there was talk of the Google black hole, where talented people would get hired and their noteworthy output would drop to…

Your theory doesn't match the timeline. Under the engineering first strategy, Google became the juggernaut it is today, with products like Gmail, Maps, Street View and of course Search. Unfortunately, the approach doesn't work for all product categories. Product design, usability, simplicity, and sheer style were not the forte of the Google of old. As a result they saw themselves fall behind Facebook in social, faile…

Completely agree with this. Did you work at Google?

Let me explain this a little more in concrete terms: are you passionate about what you do? Do you have pride in your work and want to create great, valuable (to users of course, but also profitable) software? You will probably dislike working at Google.

First, if you’re an engineer, you’re basically not going to be empowered to make important product-level decisions on anything people care about until you’re a well-established L6 or L7. Even then, you’re more of a voice in the room with the Product Managers and Directors/VPs (you might have 5 directors+ VPs who also are on your product) and business stakeholders for the little chunk you’re actually responsible for. Google is extremely hierarchical, not just in terms or a deep org chart but in empowerment, for a variety of reasons I won’t get into. Nobody will listen to you or care until you’re at this point, your ideas and suggestion will be treated like a child at the Thanksgiving kid’s table asking for a glass of wine.

Ok, so become a product manager. Well then you have to deal with the fact that you are amazingly constrained by things outside of your control, like the headcount and capacity of engineering teams who have to handle a bunch of internal migration bullshit, want to refactor or rewrite something for no business reason except because it’s easy coasting material, and handle requests from a dozen other PMs. You have to deal with a ton of bureaucracy and process bullshit just to get your product ideas turned into reality. You have no idea what’s easy and what’s hard because engineering at Google is different than at other companies (the “impossible” is just hard, but the “easy” is also hard). You’re not empowered to step in and code and design even if you can and want to. You are gonna spend a lot of time writing SQL and docs nobody cares about and still need to make it to a high “level” to matter.

Well what happens if you do get to that high level? Then you’re in charge of a million and one things and mostly doing performance management. You don’t have time to care about a product - you are the gatekeeper of it and can have strong opinions, but you simply do not have time to be passionate about it, because you have too many responsibilities and are too far removed from the actual work/product/users. You still have a deep management chain above you to contend with, you play political games for HC and need short term wins to secure it, you’re probably in a different stage of your life where your passion project is either career (not product) and/or family.

It’s still a great place to learn, the pay and benefits are still good, you still probably get to work on something cool. But your ambitions and passion will be crushed unless you can endure a decade+ of being a ~nobody. If you truly want to build something amazing you’ll have to go elsewhere.

Re: Mourning Google

#408

Post by behnamoh »

ksec wrote: post #395
behnamoh wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what it is about leaders like Steve Jobs that makes them popular despite how programmers working for them know the guy in charge has never written a line of code. Is it charisma (whatever that means)? Is it vision? Is it luck and being at the right place at the right time? Is it a few devoted loyal programmers who spread the word about how amazing the Führer is? I often think it also has to do with the perso…

Most of the people who worked directly under Steve Jobs knows he is an Asshole. At the same time they all loves him. You may want to watch [1] Steve Jobs Insult Response. And you can imagine most people are the guy asking that question. [1] https://youtu.be/oeqPrUmVz-o?si=4fMzMqFS8lLbMZJr

> You may want to watch [1] Steve Jobs Insult Response. And you can imagine most people are the guy asking that question.

Yes, but not every CEO is able to give the response he gave. At least, he tried to connect with the developers. When was the last time Google's CEO interacted with devs?

Re: Mourning Google

#409

Post by rchaud »

Apocryphon wrote: post #302
rchaud wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OHA has about as much relevance as the League of Nations did in the 1930s. Samsung makes screens, SOCs, storage and memory. They put Android into every conceivable form factor and distributed them in every country on earth at every price point. That is why Android suceeded. Google's original Android partners were HTC and Motorola, neither of whom ever had the scale to compete with Apple. Google even acquired Moto…

There was a time when it felt like HTC made every smartphone. Of course, that was very early in the history of smartphones, and mostly because HTC phones were often not branded as such, so they were almost like the mystery manufacturer behind everything. Would very much like even a fraction of these Google eulogies to have a retrospective on the fall of HTC.

HTC dominated the Windows Mobile 6.1 phones, which was a small market compared to Nokia and Blackberry.

As an independent OEM, they were selected by Google to build the G1, the first Android phone. But the touch smartphone market at the time was only in the millions. That's the scale HTC could handle.

When the market started exploding in 2010 onwards, HTC couldn't scale up, so Samsung, LG and Huawei took advantage.

Re: Mourning Google

#410

Post by Apocryphon »

rchaud wrote: post #409
Apocryphon wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a time when it felt like HTC made every smartphone. Of course, that was very early in the history of smartphones, and mostly because HTC phones were often not branded as such, so they were almost like the mystery manufacturer behind everything. Would very much like even a fraction of these Google eulogies to have a retrospective on the fall of HTC.

HTC dominated the Windows Mobile 6.1 phones, which was a small market compared to Nokia and Blackberry. As an independent OEM, they were selected by Google to build the G1, the first Android phone. But the touch smartphone market at the time was only in the millions. That's the scale HTC could handle. When the market started exploding in 2010 onwards, HTC couldn't scale up, so Samsung, LG and Huawei took advantage.

Yeah, HTC's brief dominance as the Android OEM only lasted until 2012-2013 or so. So a four or five year run, followed by a few notable collaborations with Google, the Nexus 9 and the Pixel.
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